Featured Writers

In your workshop, participants will learn about intersectionality and how to write diverse characters and characters of colour in a respectful way. Could you tell us a bit about intersectionality and who you think will benefit from your workshop?

Deborah Sheldon is a writer from Melbourne, Australia. Some of her latest releases, include the dark literary collection 300 Degree Days and Other Stories, the bio-horror novella Thylacines, the dark fantasy and horror collection Perfect Little Stitches and Other Stories, and the bio-horror novel Devil Dragon.

To read Maria Tumarkin is to embark on an intellectual journey, one that covers diverse terrain – the personal and the political via philosophy, history and memoir – taking paths that seem at first to deviate, but then interweave, taking you even deeper into the subject. I spoke to Maria about her practice, her processes and the convergences of her compelling new non-fiction work, ‘Axiomatic’.

One of the first questions I ask myself when I begin a new creative non-fiction work, short- or long-form, is existential in nature (and stolen from Shakespeare). To be or not to be? Am I going to appear in my work or not? Or, to what degree am I going to be present? Because in creative non-fiction, the author is always there, if not as an explicit ‘I’ then as the organising consciousness hovering over the work, palpable in thematic, structural and stylistic choices, with all their implicit assumptions.

In her powerful and candid memoir, ‘Eggshell Skull’, Brisbane-based writer Bri Lee recounts her year working as a judge’s associate in the Queensland District Court. During this time, she witnessed numerous instances where victims of sexual offences were denied due justice.

Benjamin Law's work draws on the personal, whether he’s tackling subjects such as growing up Asian-Australian in Queensland, exploring the LGBTQI experience throughout Asia, or taking on the critics of the Safe Schools program. He speaks to Nic Brasch about his uncanny knack for writing life.

Before computers, when we used pens, I had a boil-like bump on my fuck-you finger from pressing the pen too hard. That was even before I wrote my first piece of fiction, a runaway story where I took shelter in a Brotherhood bin.

Mentorships at Writers Victoria

Entries are now open for The Ada Cambridge Writing Prizes (The Adas). For the first time, submissions for prose and poetry are open to all writers who live in Victoria. The Young Ada Short Story Prize remains open to 14-18-year-olds, who live, study or work in Melbourne’s western suburbs. Winners...